1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to electronic commerce. More particularly, this invention relates to a technique for providing rewards in accordance to a user's interaction behavior with a computer system. One possible area of exploitation with the present invention is the area of advertising within interactive systems like the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the increasing popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web, it has become common to set up web sites for advertising, marketing, selling goods and services as well as providing product and other information and customer services. Examples for such web sites are online stores for books, computers and other goods, web sites providing information on the stock market, travel information or weather reports, search engines and access to databases. The commercial value and the stock market value of such web sites are usually proportional to the number of visitors per time interval.
A problem commonly faced by on-line advertisers and merchants is an inability to efficiently attract potential consumers to their web sites. One way of attracting consumers has been to market the site through television, newspaper and other conventional channels.
However, advertising a site using conventional methods can be expensive, and can consume significant human resources. In addition, it is often difficult or impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of a given advertisement.
“Banner” ads are an advertisement method commonly used on web pages on the Internet. If the user clicks on a banner, this has typically the effect that the web browser program automatically connects to the web site with the URL corresponding to the banner advertisement. From this new site, the user will typical follow other links to other web sites. From the viewpoint of the owner of the original site, the user risks “getting lost” in the Internet and not coming back to the original site on which the banner advertisement is placed. This problem may even discourage the owner of the original web page to integrate such banner ads from third parties or at least be very restrictive with respect to the selection and inclusion of deviating links in the site.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,210, an attention brokerage system is provided which provides compensation to users for paying attention to an advertisement or other “negatively priced” information distributed over the Internet. Attention brokerage is the business of buying and selling the attention of consumers. In its simplest form, negative pricing is a passive competition among advertisers for consumer attention in which advertisers make fixed offers to users for their selection. A special icon or other symbol displayed on a computer screen may represent compensation and allow users to choose whether they will view other negatively priced information and receive associated compensation. Targeting users may be provided by reference to a database of digitally stored demographic profiles of potential users. Information can be routed to users based on demographics, and software agents can be used to actively seek out users on a digital network. One of the drawbacks of this prior art system is that it requires an intermediate agent, i.e., an attention broker computer and registration of both users and advertisers with the attention broker computer.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,141,010, a computer interface method and apparatus with targeted advertising based upon demographics and user interaction are described. Associated with each banner advertisement is a set of data that is used by the software application in determining when a particular banner is to be displayed.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,960,411 describes a method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network. The order is placed by a purchaser at a client system and received by a server system. A server system receives purchaser information including identification of the purchaser, payment information and shipment information from the client system. The server system then assigns a client identifier to the client system and associates the assigned client identifier with the received purchaser information. The server system sends the assigned client identifier to client system and an html document identifying the item and including an order button. The clients system receives and stores the assigned identifier by means of a so-called “cookie”.